A popular sport involves pneumatic projectile launchers and opposing teams. Pneumatic projectile launchers are commonly referred to as paintball guns. In paintball game, two or more “military” teams try to capture one another's flags. Each player on a team carries a compressed gas-powered gun that shoots gelatin or plastic spherical capsules, referred to hereafter as paintballs, which contain a colored liquid. When a player is hit with a paintball from an adversary's gun, the paintball ruptures and leaves a colored “splat” on the hit player who is then “out” and must leave the game.
Over the past few years, improvements in guns and paintball feed systems have increased the sophistication of the game. For example, automatic and semiautomatic paintball guns—guns that sequentially fire individual paintballs as fast as the trigger can be repeatedly pulled—have become more prevalent. The high firing rate capability of semiautomatic paintball guns has increased the need for bulk loader devices for feeding paintballs into such guns so that play is not interrupted.
In order to continuously feed projectiles such as paintballs into the launcher, a paintball hopper feeder is provided. A paintball hopper feeder is normally adapted to internally store a relatively large quantity of paintballs (for example 50–200 paintballs) and has a bottom outlet opening through which the stored paintballs can be sequentially fed into the gun on demand from a feed tube on the hopper. High speed paintball feeding devices have motorized paintball delivery mechanisms within the hopper. Dry cell batteries, either groups of 1.5 volt batteries or 9 volt batteries are provided within the hopper to power the delivery devices.
One problem with currently available high speed storage and delivery devices for paintball guns is that the play time is limited by the battery life of the power cells used to power the delivery devices. A player is forced to discontinue firing the gun in order to change the batteries once the power cells reach an energy level insufficient to maintain a desirably high paintball delivery rate to the gun. Another disadvantage of currently available paintball delivery systems is that the delivery rate of paintballs is limited by the design of the paintball feed hopper. Another disadvantage is that a user must continuously purchase a large quantity of batteries to power the projectile launcher and hopper.
Accordingly, there continues to be a need for improvements to paintball feed hoppers that significantly enhance the play time and rate of delivery of paintballs to a paintball gun, particularly a semiautomatic or automatic paintball gun.